When you went to the effort of coming up with a reasonably sounding UK address, why spoil it with a “yahoo.cn” email address?

I’ll admit that pretending to be investigating a Nigerian scam, and to warn against communicating with anybody else to avoid being scammed, is somewhat inventive:

Last year, a meeting was held with the General Director of the Interpol and some other top officials in the United Kingdom concerning the online internet scam from Nigeria and so many other countries, in the conclusion of the meeting, I was ordered by the Interpol to fly down to Malaysia for special investigation concerning the delay of your payment, because in our record file, Malaysia was the country where your funds payment was channel to for a very long time.

You need to understand that my coming down to Malaysia is because of your funds transfer, and I have to accomplish the transfer before returning back to the United Kingdom, all the legal documentation for your funds are with me here in Malaysia, what i just need from you now is your corporation, you have to seize communication with any other person different from me to avoid been mislead.

Don’t allow anyone to deceive you, your funds is $10,000,000.00 (Ten Million United States Dollars Only) it was written inside the recording files of your funds.

…

Upon the receipt of this information, I will email you or call you and give you code on how to communicate with me and I will always keep you updated concerning the progress of the funds transfer, once again you are advised to seize all communication with any other office or person to avoid been mislead, and whenever you receive any message from anybody talking about your funds, kindly forward it to me so that i can make a proper investigation on it.

I just came back from one of the county recycling stations, where I had an interesting conversation with the guy on duty. I think it was about the economic crisis, the fact that it’s even worse than the Great Depression because young people today have no idea how to at least get food on the table even though they have no money (by fishing and hunting), that contractors in the area have absolutely no jobs lined up whatsoever, and that they have been foolish to not save any money when the going was good.

I say I think that’s what it was about . I think I heard snatches such as “Hoover’s days”, “young people”, “contractors”, but the North Carolina dialect was so strong, with an overlay of mumbling, that it might have been about quantum physics, for all I know.

Even though it was a bit uncomfortable (who knows what I was actually agreeing with, all those times when I nodded and said “uh huh” or “yeah”), the experience did provide me with an epiphany.

All those proposals about English as an official language, they have not gone nearly far enough. We need not just an official language, we need a language spoken in such a way that people can actually understand it. Combine that thought with the economic crisis, and think of the possibilities:

we will need countless language teachers (who won’t need a little refresher course in either grammar or pronunciation?) , so English majors will suddenly be in short supply

we will need an army of officials who can administer official language tests and certify people, so this will create a huge number of new jobs

this economic stimulus will eliminate political opposition from right wing Republicans – even those who seem to think that government jobs are not real jobs would have to support it

In short, I have the solution to the deadlock over the economic stimulus package: a spending program which in one fell swoop will garner support both from the “government-expanding, latte-drinking, sushi-eating, Volvo-driving, New York Times-reading” liberals because of the spending aspects and from the “gun-toting, bible thumping bitter wingnuts” because of the support for one of their pet projects.

You can thank me later, President Obama 🙂

Update: OK, just to make sure: y’all do realize this is tongue-in-cheek, right?

Everybody has a favorite example of Google coming up with suggestions for alternative searches – “Did you mean *****?” it politely asks when your search resembles something other people have searched for, and sometimes those suggestions are wildly off base, of course.

The search engine we use on the IBM intranet has a similar feature, and the alternative suggestions are usually reasonably close to the original search. This one has me stumped, though:

I searched for

issi update flash player fails

(because an automated software update keeps failing on my machine, and I wanted to see if it was a known problem).

The alternative suggestion was:

Did you mean: Standard Software Installer, blink?

I get the “Standard Software Installer” suggestion for “issi”, since that’s what the acronym stands for, but ‘blink’ for the rest?? Maybe the algorithm has ‘blink’ listed as a synonym for ‘flash’, but still – a little optimistic to think that I simply stuck the remaining 3 words in there as filler.